Window Managers

Introduction
This is intended to be a brief article on how to install and configure various Window Managers on Debian Sid.

Resources
CrunchBang forum member 2ManyDogs did and incredible review of 30 window managers in 30 days. Reviewing this is highly recommended.

Openbox
apt-get install openbox obconf obmenu menu

You may also like to install the package.

Now create your users Openbox configuration

su - username mkdir -p ~/.config/openbox cp /etc/xdg/openbox/* ~/.config/openbox/

At this point run startx as your normal user account to check everything is working at a base level.

startx

Right click on the Desktop and choose exit once complete.

Starting X Automatically
Install python-xdg as Openbox depends on it for xdg autostart stuff.

apt-get install python-xdg

Option 1: Start X when logging in to tty1
This method requires no display manager.

Simply append the following code to your standard users ~/.profile

if [ -z $DISPLAY ] && [ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ] ; then { exec startx -- -dpi 96 2>&1 | logger -t x-session ; exit ; } fi

And create an

echo "exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch openbox-session" > ~/.xinitrc

Then login to console 1 as your standard user and you should find that Openbox launches automatically.

xdg auto start
Due to a bug in the openbox-session script you cannot append arguments to the openbox-session script. For the startx method you can to the following:

Create the following script called and place it in your $PATH e.g.  or

A="/etc/xdg/openbox/environment" test -r $A &&. $A A="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-"$HOME/.config"}/openbox/environment" test -r $A &&. $A exec /usr/bin/openbox --startup "/usr/lib/openbox/openbox-autostart OPENBOX GNOME" "$@"
 * 1) !/bin/sh
 * 1) Set up the environment
 * 1) Run Openbox, and have it run the autostart stuff

Then update replacing  with

echo "exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch openbox-session-autostart" > ~/.xinitrc

See this link for further information.

Option 2: Graphical login using lightdm
apt-get install lightdm

lightdm does not source like some other desktop managers and Debian will not alter this unless upstream do. So if you have options in that you need sourced in your X windows sesssion then you can do the following:

Edit and append the following (create the file if it does not exist).

. /etc/profile . ${HOME}/.profile

See this link for further information.

xdg auto start
If you would like files in that only start in gnome, xfce or kde to launch with your Openbox session you can do the following:

cp /usr/bin/openbox-session ~/.xsession

Then edit the last line in adding "GNOME" (or other desktop environments) to the openbox-autostart arguments so the line would look like

exec /usr/bin/openbox --startup "/usr/lib/openbox/openbox-autostart OPENBOX GNOME" "$@"

See this link for further information.